This reminds me of an interview in 2007, when @svembu was asked whether Zoho could compete with Microsoft and Google. Interesting to look back at it today. Watch till the end to hear the prediction made in 2007. Thanks @rajonthemove for preserving this video.

The opportunity depends on what we see. Are we looking at the number of job openings that exist now, or the actual market opportunity that exists? Every global vendor enters India not to create job. They enter to capture the market. The reason Starlink is fighting to get into India is simple. India could be the world's last high growth, high scale consumer market opportunity for them. When talent returns & starts building for India market, capital will follow because capital always chases the market opportunity.

Sridhar has shared the difficult decision we have taken to skip appraisals this year, given the rising costs and uncertain outlook for the software industry. Every software business will be having this discussion and making difficult choices. These are real-world situations where there is no single right answer. The decision depends on what we choose to prioritise. These are also decisions AI cannot make for us. During COVID, we made a similar decision. We offered free licences to customers, even though it meant losing revenue. This time, we had to deal with the sharp increase in server costs. We discussed these options internally. Lay off employees. While layoffs are common across businesses, we felt it wasn't the right choice when our business is still growing. We have over a million customers to support and products to keep improving. Cutting jobs could affect both employees & customers. Instead, we want to reduce costs by focusing on R&D to make our products and infrastructure more efficient. Reduce other expenses. We have decided to cut our marketing spend and are looking at ways to improve efficiency across the business. Increase prices. Customers are already dealing with rising costs and geopolitical uncertainty. So we don't want to add to their burden. We want to first do what is in our control before doing this. Skip appraisal. This was a difficult decision, but we wanted to avoid layoffs and price increases. So we made this tough decision. As a private company, we have to take care of our customers and employees. Publicly listed companies also have shareholder expectations to consider. There is no one right decision in these situations. Ultimately, it comes down to what we choose to prioritise and how we balance the needs of our customers, employees and business for the long term.

Anyone who has built and scaled a product business understands the risks involved and the cost of R&D. Not every product we build will succeed, but we still have to keep investing in new products and markets. A healthy product business needs reserves to fund R&D and withstand uncertainty. Annual profit alone doesn't tell you how much money is available for distribution.

1 year with Arattai. Started it as a “let me try an Indian WhatsApp alternative” experiment. Ended up using it every day. Calls are clear, chats are fast, groups work without drama, and the privacy controls actually feel useful. Not a clone for the sake of it — it holds its own. For everyday messaging, it’s genuinely comparable to WhatsApp. And for me, it’s stayed that way for a full year. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a proper week. You’ll know.

That's the difference between building things because you enjoy building them and building things just to make money so you can buy the things you enjoy...

Why flexibility is a core feature of B2B software? Every business is different. That difference is what makes each business unique, and we have to build B2B software around that reality. Having built B2B products for many years, I see product evolution happening at two levels. The first is what we build for every customer. We add new features that can benefit many of our customers. The second happens inside each customer instance. They don't just use what we built. They configure the product for the way they work. Customers create their own workflows, reports, use cases and approvals. They integrate with other software they use and extend it for use cases we may never have thought about. This is what I see as one of the biggest differences between B2B and B2C software. In most B2C products, the vendor controls most of the product evolution. When a new feature is released, everyone gets the same feature. In B2B, every customer can take the same product and shape it differently. We can never build everything every customer needs as the customer knows their business better than we do. That is why I believe flexibility is not just another feature of B2B software. It is a core part of the product. Our job is not only to keep adding features. It is also to give customers the building blocks to create what they need.

We opened Arattai for Business. Businesses pay to communicate with their customers. But not every message is a commercial message. A railway ticket confirmation, a hospital appointment reminder or a school notification is an essential service communication. We don't think businesses should have to pay for these communications. That cost eventually gets passed on to the customer. That is why we are giving businesses a choice. The Arattai Business Platform is free for government and public services. For healthcare and educational institutions, we are giving an allowance of 1 million messages every month. We are also building integrations so businesses can connect their existing software and automation systems with Arattai.

I want to answer this question in a seperate post. Looking back, one of the important decisions we made was deciding what problem we wanted to solve. That decision changed our priorities and shaped many of the choices we made. While most vendors looked at building one application for a category as the problem to solve, we looked at running a business end-to-end as the problem to solve. We want to run the entire Zoho business on Zoho, without depending on third-party applications. To do that, we needed a strong underlying framework on which all our applications could be built. So we built our own cloud stack from multi-tenancy, databases, storage, IAM, messaging, search, caching, queues and many other foundational services. This meant every application team didn't have to solve the same infrastructure problems repeatedly. That investment allowed us to build applications across domains much faster, while keeping control of the underlying infrastructure and technology. We also saw that the early SaaS market was largely a best-of-breed market, but believed that consolidation would eventually happen and businesses would want more integrated software. So we built the broader ecosystem needed to run a business. Around 2010, we started running Zoho on Zoho internally. This gave us a large internal customer that continuously exposed gaps in the platform and helped us improve it. Today, with 20,000+ employees across 20+ countries and more than 16 data centres worldwide, we run Zoho on Zoho. From internal collaboration, email and document storage to CRM, marketing, customer service, HR, accounting, events and travel & expense management, we use our own software. We also use ManageEngine to manage our own infrastructure and employee endpoints. With our own data centres, NOC and SOC operations, running this infrastructure at scale gives us another demanding internal customer for our ManageEngine products. Inside Zoho, we also run our own kitchen to serve food for employees. From breakfast and lunch to snacks and dinner, we have an extensive menu, and all these operations run on Zoho. We also operate our own employee transportation and use Zoho to manage that. In the last decade, we also built more than 4 million square feet of office space & we used Zoho to manage that construction. We hired architects from outside but entire construction was managed in-house to ensure quality. Running these operations ourselves creates new challenges for our products and the underlying platform. For the product teams, Zoho is another customer and so nothing can be hardcoded for Zoho. This gives the discipline to the product teams to build features as customisable & not hard coded for one customer. All of this required continuous investment in the underlying cloud framework. Many of these capabilities are still not exposed through Catalyst, and we will progressively open them up as services. So, to your question about whether Zoho can become a full hyperscaler: we already have many of the foundational capabilities needed to build a cloud platform. Catalyst is a good example of the direction we are taking. Instead of exposing developers to the complexity of servers, provisioning and scaling, we abstract that away and offer these capabilities as a unified platform. We want developers to think about the compute, storage and services they need, rather than the servers required to run them. Catalyst already does this for application development with managed compute, databases, storage, APIs, authentication and autoscaling. The goal is to keep expanding the services we offer with the same level of abstraction. Our immediate priority is to open up more of the foundational services we already use internally. Postgres is one of them. We plan to make it available through Catalyst as a managed service. But we don't see business software as a solved problem. With AI, the challenges for businesses are only going to increase. That means we have to keep evolving both our products and the underlying platform for the future.

One of the most important differences between building for the next quarter and building for the next decade is where you choose to invest. Instead of putting more capital into sales and marketing, we invested heavily in R&D and built our own technology capabilities. We relied more on organic, word-of-mouth growth. That is why we built our own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on public cloud like AWS or Google Cloud. When Zoho was small, building that cloud infrastructure looked like an unnecessary investment and distraction. But over time, it became a technology foundation that we could open up to developers through Catalyst, our serverless platform. The same long-term thinking continues today. We’re investing heavily in Catalyst and making it free for students, giving them infrastructure to build and deploy real applications without worrying about infrastructure costs. We’re also setting up Student Clubs in colleges. Not every investment has to create immediate revenue. Some investments create capabilities. Some create opportunities that may not become visible for years. That’s the difference between optimizing for the next quarter and building for the next decade.

The future of work may not be about jobs that AI cannot do. It may be about jobs that humans want only humans to do.

I can share this from my personal experience. In 1996, when we were building products for telecom OEMs, we already had a good customer base in China. In the early 2000s, almost 10% of our global revenue came from China. At the same time, our revenue from India was almost zero because there were hardly any telecom OEMs here. Many Indian-origin entrepreneurs were building technology companies in the US but none was present in India. One Indian customer we sold our software to was Reliance Communications, and even that was through UTStarcom, which used our platform to build its Element Management System (EMS). At that time, the broad perception was that China was strong in hardware and telecom equipment, while software was not really its strength. But Huawei and ZTE were already building their own telecom technology. Then came Alibaba, Baidu, followed by Tencent, WeChat, ByteDance, and now companies like DeepSeek. India took a different path. In the 1990s, we discovered a huge opportunity in providing software development and IT services to the world. Our English-speaking workforce and competitive costs made us very attractive to global companies. Y2K accelerated this model. It was a huge success. For us in Zoho, one of the top reasons for attrition at that time was the lack of onsite opportunities that service companies could offer. As a product vendor, our partners handled local implementation and so we did not have much onsite work to offer our employees. Indian IT companies grew by building and maintaining technology for global companies. There was enormous demand for outsourcing, and we became exceptionally good at it. China took a different path. It built strength in hardware and telecom, and then built its own software and Internet companies, starting with its huge domestic market. India had a very different ecosystem. The local product ecosystem was limited, and there was very little domestic market for software products (in the SMB segment) at that time. The larger enterprise market was dominated by global vendors. So naturally, we ended up building technology for global companies rather than building our own products for the global market.

You are right that network effects are real. Moving an individual user from WhatsApp to Arattai is very different from moving an enterprise from Windows to Linux or from MySQL to PostgreSQL. In messaging, the value of the network depends on where the people you want to communicate with are. But I don't think that means everyone has to abandon WhatsApp for moving to Arattai. I use Arattai, WhatsApp and iMessage. We use multiple SIM cards, multiple bank accounts and multiple social-media platforms. Why should messaging be different? People can use multiple apps depending on whom they need to reach. The bigger issue is competition. If almost all users are concentrated on one messaging platform, businesses don't have much bargaining power because they have to be present where their customers are. That gives the platform considerable pricing power. If there is a credible alternative, businesses have another option. Even if they continue using WhatsApp, the existence of competition can put pressure on platforms to keep pricing and services competitive. We are all both producers and consumers. If a hospital, diagnostic lab or car-service business pays more for messaging, payment processing, software, logistics, etc., some of those costs can eventually find their way into the prices customers pay. So I'm not saying everyone needs to leave WhatsApp to join Arattai. The point is that we should have credible alternatives and the option to use multiple apps. I agree that network effects make competition difficult, but I don't want to believe that they make competition impossible.

For everyone, WhatsApp has won. For us, giving up would mean letting the other side win. We know why people use WhatsApp. Everyone is already there. Your family is there. Your friends are there. Your communities are there. That’s what makes switching so hard. But every alternative in technology started with someone willing to try. Linux challenged Microsoft. MySQL and PostgreSQL challenged established database ecosystems. Arattai will challenge WhatsApp. We’re not asking you to leave anything. Give Arattai a try. Tell us what you like. Tell us what we need to improve. Because every meaningful alternative exists because someone was willing to be an early adopter. If you believe technology should have choices, give us a chance. We’re improving. We’re listening. And we’re not giving up.

Launching Elder, Charmer, and Healer. They’re not products. They’re hills we’ve built in our campus to plant trees. Elder is the tallest. Charmer brings flowers and beauty. Healer is for medicinal trees and plants. For the last 30 years, we’ve built software products across different domains and industries. Yet over the last decade, we’ve also been working on something very different, something that could last for centuries, something that sustains itself. Something that won't get impacted with AI ☺️ We launched it quietly at Zoholics. rootedinzoho.com/

Opinion: Zoho One / Zoho workplace could replace 80+% of Microsoft 365 Office suite users at a small fraction of the cost. If GoI promotes these, we could save a Billion Dollar forex outflow.

Why does an IT company campus have to look like an IT campus? 🙂 "Curved streets create an inherent sense of mystery, because their vistas reveal themselves only gradually, as one's movement changes one's perspective.” — Camillo Sitte Instead of building another boring corporate block, it's an campus with lot of curved streets, trees, shops and places to meet. A peek into the open-air theatre (OAT), the terrace garden and the curved streets...

It's still the best 😉. It hasn't disappeared. We just don't spend much time talking about ourselves. We spend our time enhancing products, adding new products, serving more customers and expanding into new verticals. More than 50,000 new customers around the world choose Zoho every month. The business continues to grow. Companies don't have to be in the news to grow.

Net worth numbers are paper wealth tied to fluctuating stock markets. What we really need to celebrate is the Top 100 Taxpayers in India. While wealth rankings show who is richest, a tax-payer list shows who is actively funding the nation's public infrastructure, government schools, and healthcare. Infrastructure development happens at the tax counter and not on a stock ticker.

For your business to be successful, don't position things internally to make them look better than they are.